L.A. shooting brings out the online haters
A shooting in a Los Angeles parking garage early this morning in which two men were wounded may or may not be a hate crime — it’s too soon to tell, say the L.A. police and the city’s mayor, Antonio Villaraigosa.
The men were going to a prayer service at Adat Yeshurun Valley Sephardic, a synagogue in North Hollywood, when a gunman shot first one and then the other in the leg. Both men are recovering. Here are links to some of the news stories about the event:
http://www.ktla.com/news/landing/ktla-noho-synagogue-shooting,0,5720530.story
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091029/ap_on_re_us/us_synagogue_shooting
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2009/10/detectives-search-for-suspect-motive-in-la-synagogue-shooting.html
Hate crime or no, coverage of the shooting, not just the shooting itself, has brought the usual Web-emboldened anti-Semites crawling out onto the media comment pages. Sure, there were the right-minded posters, like the person on the LATimes site who asked, “Isn’t it time to look past the differences and realize that we are all one people, one planet? Will that day ever come?” But they are all too frequently in the company of the conspiracy-minded haters.
Another person writing on the Times Web site wondered why there were several stories on the shooting “and how many other people are shot down killed today and theres hardly any mention of those, if at all? and certainly not the rolling out of resources as is the example here? why is that?”
Oh, right — the story is getting covered because the Jews run the media. Silly us for thinking it was because a potential hate crime is worth reporting on.
29 Oct, 2009 > Comment - 0 -
Arizona academic made excuses for Hitler in 1934
Stephen H. Norwood’s new book, “The Third Reich in the Ivory Tower: Complicity and Conflict on American Campuses” (just published by Cambridge University Press) is billed as “the first systematic exploration of the nature and extent of sympathy for Nazi Germany at American universities during the 1930s.” Among other things, it contains some startling news for Arizonans.
Norwood, a history professor at the University of Oklahoma, details how, on numerous college campuses in the U.S., prominent, educated Americans who should have known better chose to become part of the Nazi propaganda machine, in spite of the road signs pointing toward the Final Solution.
The book describes the Harvard administration’s 1935 decision to permit Nazi Germany’s consul in Boston to place a wreath bearing the swastika emblem in the university’s Memorial Church, at a ceremony attended by prominent Harvard faculty members and visiting professors from Nazi Germany. It chronicles Columbia University’s determination to “preserve friendly ties with Nazi Germany” through at least 1936, and the commitment of many Seven Sisters’ administrators and faculty members to serve as cheerleaders for the Reich.
Southwest academic institutions, alas, were not immune. Norwood reports that in the summer of 1934, for the first time, a group of American faculty and students traveled around Nazi Germany under the guidance of Nazi party and government officials. The purpose of the tour was to “correct…the false attitude toward the new Germany adopted by the greater part of the American public.” (It seems the American public had grown alarmed by what they perceived as the suppression of academic freedom in Germany, including book burnings.) According to Norwood, the tour participants elected as their group leader one Homer LeRoy Shantz, president of the University of Arizona. He was the only university president on the trip.
“Upon the group’s return,” writes Norwood, “their leader, President Shantz, trumpeted Hitler’s achievements….President Shantz described German agriculture and land use ‘as the most perfect ever developed’ and marveled that ‘(t)here are not as many weeds in Germany as in 1 square mile in this country.’ He described the German people as ‘busy and active.’ They backed their Fuehrer much as Americans backed President Roosevelt. Shantz expressed his disapproval of American press coverage of Germany, explaining that it reported ‘the worst possible events.’”
A German film crew produced a propaganda movie about the trip called “Germany Today,” which was distributed free on American campuses to counteract “Jewish atrocity propaganda” in the American media. It would be interesting to watch that film today, knowing exactly who — and what — Shantz and company were making apologies for.
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24 Jul, 2009 > Comment - 1 -
Ethnic studies: Dividing students?
More than one reader has suggested that there’s irony in the fact that state superintendent of schools Tom Horne, who’s Jewish, supports a state senate bill that would do away with ethnic studies in public schools (S.B. 1069, sponsored by Tucson Republican Sen. Jonathan Paton). The exact language in the bill is “Prohibits Arizona schools from instruction in ethnic studies aimed at a particular group or that advocate ethnic solidarity.”
But Horne says his being Jewish and supporting the bill is the opposite of ironic.
“One of the reasons that the Jewish people have done so well in the United States is that we are treated as individuals and not as exemplars of a race,” Horne says. “And traditionally, the public schools have taken students from different backgrounds and taught them to treat each other as individuals.
“When they start dividing us up by race, it is the Jewish people who will suffer the most. I know this personally because my uncle was denied admission to college in Russia, because they limited the number of Jews who could attend based on a racial quota.”
“I think being Jewish has a lot to do with my point of view here,” Horne says. “I’m shocked that any Jewish person would favor dividing students by race in the public schools.”
Horne says that the Tucson Unified School District has four ethnic studies program, which he lists as “what they call Raza studies, for the Latino kids; African American studies for the African American kids; Asian studies for the Asian kids, and Native American studies for the Native American kids.” He pauses a second and adds, “It sounds like the Nuremberg laws.”
Horne says he’d rather see a good world studies class and a good history class than courses taught by ethnicity.
“The point is for all kids to learn about all cultures.”
For information about what the bill calls for specifically, see here.
26 Jun, 2009 > Comment - 0 -
Welcome to "Need to Know"
This blog is called "Need to Know" because that's what it is: a look at stories around the Valley and elsewhere that we thought readers needed to know more about. If there's a story you'd like me to look into, e-mail me.
The Anti-Defamation League released its annual Audit of Anti-Semitic Incidents just days shy of the June 10 shooting at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in D.C., surely one of the ugliest of such attacks.
The good news is that according to the report, the number of anti-Semitic incidents reported in the U.S. decreased for the fourth year in a row. The bad (although not surprising) news is that Jews are the number one religious group targeted by hate. The audit identified 37 physical assaults on Jewish individuals, 702 incidences of anti-Semitic vandalism and 613 cases of harassment in 2008.
One of the incidents took place in Prescott in September: According to Bill Straus, who heads up our local ADL office, a Jewish sixth-grade special needs child was beaten by an eighth-grade child after the Jewish child was asked if he was Jewish. "ADL followed up with the school," Straus wrote in an e-mail. "The perpetrator was disciplined."
Straus says quite a few incidents similar to the one in Prescott took place in the course of 2008 but "for one reason or another, primarily the family's not willing to go on the record, they aren't included in the audit. The audit is like the hate crimes statistics. The one thing you know for sure is there's more than indicated on the pages."
Late last month, Phoenix police called to let Straus know that swastikas and graffiti, including anti-Jewish and white power statements, had been drawn on the classroom door of a Jewish teacher at a school in the Valley. Incidents of swastikas alone being drawn or painted or even, lately, burned into grass with chemicals are unfortunately not uncommon; in May, Straus says, vandals defaced a billboard in Chandler marking the future site of a Chabad building with anti-Semitic graffiti.
In Straus's words, if the ADL spent its time following up on every random swastika, "we'd never get anything else done."
18 Jun, 2009 > Comment - 0 -